Trojan

Malware Supply Chain Links Eleven Attacks

Fresh off their discovery of a previously unknown (‘zero day’) security hole in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser, researchers at the security firm Fireeye say that they have evidence that a string of sophisticated attacks have a common origin. In a report released on Monday (PDF), the firm said that many seemingly unrelated cyber attacks identified in the last year appear to be part of a “broader offensive fueled by a shared development and logistics infrastructure” — what Fireeye terms a ‘supply chain’ for advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks. At least 11 APT campaigns targeting “a wide swath of industries” in recent months were found to be built on a the same infrastructure of malicious applications and services, including shared malware tools and malicious binaries with the same timestamps and digital certificates. “Taken together, these commonalities point to centralized APT planning and development,” Fireeye wrote. The attacks link at least 11 separate […]

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Ephemeral, In-Memory Attack Used With New IE 0Day

It was just last week that we wrote about research from the security firm Triumfant that found evidence for the growing use of ephemeral “diskless” malware. That point was driven home over the weekend, with a report from the firm Fireeye that found a new Internet Explorer zero day vulnerability was being used in conjunction with a disk-less variant of the Hydraq (aka “McRAT”) Trojan horse program.   Fireeye first called attention to the existence of attacks exploiting new, “zero day” (or previously unknown) vulnerabilities in the Internet Explorer web browser on Friday. The company discovered the malicious activity on the web site of a “strategically important website” that was being used as a “watering hole” to attack visitors who were “interested in national and international security policy.” The company described two IE vulnerabilities: an information leakage hole and an IE out-of-bounds memory access vulnerability. The information leak affects Windows XP […]

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Windows XP Users Six Times More Likely To Be Infected By Malware

Microsoft came out with a new edition of its Security Intelligence Report today, saying that company data shows that Windows XP machines are much more likely to be infected in encounters with malicious software on the Internet. Windows XP machines were six times more likely to be infected than machines running Windows 8, the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system, the company said. The Security Intelligence Report (or SIR) is a unique window into the malicious activity online, given Microsoft’s massive footprint of more than 1 billion systems running versions of the Windows operating system, and the detailed data it collects from them through its automatic update patching- and malware removal features. This is the 15th such report Microsoft has issued.  The company used the latest report to hammer home a message about the need for Windows XP users to move off that system to a newer version of the […]

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APT-For-Hire: Symantec Outs Hidden Lynx Hacking Crew

This site and others have been writing about the “Advanced Persistent Threat” problem, which has generally been treated as a euphemism for the government and military of The People’s Republic of China or – in some cases – Russia, Iran, North Korea or other un-friendlies. Firms like Mandiant have taken pains to separate the concept of APT from run of the mill cyber criminal hacking groups whose motivation is profit, rather than the acquisition of information that can be used to advance geopolitical or economic goals. Cyber criminal groups may well use “advanced” in their attack methods and “persistent” in their efforts to compromise victim networks, but they weren’t “APT.” Now Symantec Corp. has put a fly into that ointment: publishing a report that pulls the covers off an APT group dubbed “Hidden Lynx” that it claims is responsible for some of the most sophisticated and large scale hacks of […]

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Report: Cell Phone Data, Blackberry Mail Swept Up In NSA’s Net

Sensitive data from every major brand of cell phone can be captured and analyzed by the U.S. National Security Agency, (NSA) according to a report in the German magazine Der Spiegel on Saturday.   Citing “top-secret, internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL reporters, the magazine said that NSA security researchers have developed tools to sap contact lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information from popular devices such as Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Blackberry phones, including Blackberry e-mail, a supposedly secure system that is one of the phone’s most trumpeted features. The documents describe a large-scale and well-organized program within the NSA to obtain data from mobile devices, with discrete teams of security analysts working on a specific platform, developing malware that infiltrates the computers the phones “synch” with, and then loads scripts onto the phones that provide access to a range of other features. See Also: Secure e-mail firms […]

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